Bugzilla Bug 20854

I find that Ghostscript refuses to render any of the higher unicode characters
(> 255), i.e. CJK ideographs.

I suspect it is the lack of fonts, or a limitation of Postscript... Or is it
just  a misconfigured piece of software?

The missing glyphs are rendered as 1 (one) hollow rectangle. 

If it is a limitation of Postscript, is there another way around this? PDFs seem
to support multi-byte encodings... But as soon as I try to print them, they come
out, with all the >255 characters as single hollow rectangles. (My printer is a
raster printer, therefore the PDF has to be processed by ghostscript)

do you have the apropiate fonts installed? I can remember when I had to get CJK
working with Tex I also found documents for ghostscript and you had to have
those japanese fonts (eg wadalab) installed or you can't view/create them.

I have appropriate fonts installed, I see them perfectly fine in Mozilla, gedit
etc. But not after it has been converted to Postscript.

I think it is a limitation of Postscript, I read somewhere that it was
impossible to use more than the first 256 glyphs in a Postscript font.

I did some tests... The Postscript interpreter dies:

/SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian DoFont
Loading SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian font from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian.ttf... Error: /rangecheck in --string--
Operand stack:
   SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian   SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian   Font   SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian   770455   SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian   --nostringval--   SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian   (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/SIL-Kai-Reg-Jian.ttf)   false   --nostringval--   77018   77018
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   %loop_continue   2   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   3   %oparray_pop   3   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--
 --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   6   4   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   %array_continue   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--
%loop_continue   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   11   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   %array_continue   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1055/1123(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:116/200(L)--   --dict:17/17(ro)(G)--   --dict:1055/1123(ro)(G)--   --dict:28/50(ro)(G)--   --dict:12/40(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 25


It would seem that there are too many glyphs in the font... Or not.

hmm.. u got cjk in USE ?

Yes, I have CJK. I am almost certain it is a limitation of PostScript. Perhaps
some patches and extensions need to be applied. Everytime I convert a Unicode
TTF into a PostScript font (Type1), it warns me "glyphs higher than 255 will
not be accessible"

In the meantime, I wait for someone to finish off the XPrint ebuild I have
started in another bugreport.

I have the same problem.  Ghostscript does require a patch for CJK
(http://www.gyve.org/gs-cjk/).  That's probably what's needed.

Hi,  I can use Japanese fonts with ghostscript-7.05.6-r2 with USE="cjk" (only
use gs and ghostview to display ps file, though). kochi-substitute is known not
to work with ghostscript-7.0x, but if you were using kochi-fonts you would be
able to see Japanese PostScript file.  I'm not sure about the other languages,
korean and chinese, but at least it works for me. 

Well, it works better now - but it is still flaky for Postscript produced by
Mozilla. Perhaps I should look for real CJK postscript files instead.

what's the status of this?

it's working for me and usata, if you still have problems, please reopen
the bug and attach an example file :)

Created an attachment (id=19476) [details]
PS from Mozilla with the problem

I am beginning to think it is because the fonts for the characters don't
exist... Could someone provide a file that works for them?

OK, so it is a font problem and/or a Gecko problem. I printed a multilingual
document using (a) Monospace (b) Arial Unicode MS, and (b) printed with more,
but not all glyphs.

I also note that Ghostscript doesn't support BiDi... Hebrew and Arabic text
got rendered left-to-right, and obviously, the Arabic characters were rendered
using the isolated form.

Evidently, the Pango substitution happening at render-to-X11-time is not
happening at render-to-PostScript time.

RESOLVED INVALID is OK with me.